Our Favorite Quotes about City Lore & City Lore in the Pages of The New York Times

“What I love about City Lore is that you’re such wise renegades.”

~ City Lore member Sonnet Takahisa

“City Lore takes on the practical sides of a utopian endeavor.”

~ Writer and poet Marc Kaminsky

“I hate to see people throwing good things out just to keep up with modern times. That’s why City Lore is so important.”

~Community liaison, Khadijah Shaheed

Evaluation by Dr. William Westerman commissioned by the Artography initiative of LINC, funded by the Ford Foundation:

It’s hard to understand what City Lore does in terms of art-making without first understanding how folklorists think of the concept of art. It is as if in Western society what is seen as the arts is equivalent to the visible light in the spectrum, whereas folklorists see the art across the whole spectrum, from ultraviolet to infrared. That full range of creative expression is what concerns the mission of City Lore, and it includes history and memory, language and religion, food and gardens, lace and place.

The difference between City Lore and other arts programs is not simply that the arts presented are folk and traditional arts, but that City Lore’s arts are traditional and modern, and a great deal of the artmaking takes place in the collaborations of different cultural organizations and artists, and in the ties between the traditional and the way that contemporary New Yorkers use and adapt their traditions in their current work, whether they are professionals or schoolchildren. In this way, musical and poetic forms that build on traditional genres – including hip-hop, mambo, spoken word and written poetry – are part of a continuum of artistic practice that recognizes and builds upon deep genealogical connections to the past without being bound by them. It is in this way that City Lore’s work gets far beyond nostalgia, because the thrust is always forward-looking, not referring to what once was and could never be again, but building creatively with respect for the cultural foundations that exist.

City Lore in the Pages of The New York Times

Selected Articles, 2005-2011

“Where Stories are Remembered.”October 6, 2011.A portrait of Kewulay Kamara who is recreating and documenting an epic handed down in his family in Sierra Leone in collaboration with City Lore. Read it Here

“Looking South, Not East into New York’s Past.”September 16, 2010.A review by Edward Rothstein of the exhibition Nueva York at El Museo del Barrio curated by City Lore. Read it Here